|
Tape change.
So you talked a little bit about Justin Herman and Hannibal Williams and your involvement. Could you describe your interactions with them and with the redevelopment agency?
Well, Doctor Williams was a really good guy. I got to know him just before he accepted his call into the ministry. He was just a very active guy in this community who had actually, just prior to this, been an alcoholic and had difficulty speaking, stuttered really bad, and so forth. But he was just a very passionate guy, who started going to community meetings, who was one of the people willing to stand up. You had him and the late Mrs. Mary Helen Rogers, who were folk who would defy anyone. If they thought they were right, if they thought someone was trying to harm their community, Hannibal would stand up to anybody. Trust me, if it had been the president, whoever the president was at that time, probably Lyndon Johnson, Hannibal would have looked him in the eye, told him he was wrong and cussed at him. Which is kind of what we did in those days, we talked differently. Cussing had a more shocking effect. Now for you all's generation, you guys have elevated it to conversation, which I don't thing is a good idea, by the way. Now you've left us with no words with which to shock people and let folk know how really angry you are. If MF becomes a term of endearment, how do I let you know you're a lousy MF, you know what I mean? I don't really like that.
Justin Herman. I'm trying to remember if he and I ever had a civil conversation. I don't really think so. Now, he had civil conversations with people who opposed him. I don't think he and I did. You have to understand, at that time I was still, I don't even want to say coming out of, but still a part of and caught up in the whole issue of black radicalism and the black power movement. The BSU at San Francisco state was a counterpart to the Black Panther Party. We were part in parcel of the same thing. In events and demonstrations we showed up in our leather jackets and our berets too, you know what I mean. And so, I wasn't designed at that point to have a civil conversation with people like him, Justin Herman. He represented everything that I thought was wrong with this country. I think we were at one meeting at the redevelopment agency, a commission meeting, that became so ruckus, we were going back and forth and Justin Herman said something that we thought was really base and disrespectful. There's a very famous picture of a friend of mine, a guy I knew, he's deceased now, who leaped over the rail and grabbed Justin Herman by his collar. I mean this guy was my size and probably weighed more. He with one hand leaped over that, there was a railing there about this high, and leaped over it, up there where they sat. They sat in one of those benches like judges do. It was just more of them, and just grabbed him in his collar and was getting ready to…when the people pulled him off and so on and so forth. That's how it was.
Later on in a redevelopment meeting, the president of their commission at the time was a man who I disagreed with so severely. All the time, we were fighting back and forth. I had made some statements in a commission meeting, and I happened to be right. They had to stop our development process and kind of start over because I pointed out some things, and he was very angry with that. But I think, he was more angry at me being right than anything else. The redevelopment agency still has that problem today, by the way. We were getting on the elevator when he, one of the other commissioners who I was very friendly with, the executive director Wilbur Hamilton, who I was very friendly with, and the head of security, who I was very friendly with. Much friendlier than he [the president of the commission] was. I was very young in those days. You have to understand this wasn't Reverend Townsend this was Arnold. I was talking to the people I was friendly with and he jumps into the middle of the conversation, out of order. He says to me, “you know what your trouble is? You're just going to have to learn how to behave”. Now let me tell you something. For a white man to say that to a full-grown adult black male, you know, it's the same a calling you “boy”. And I snapped. When he said that I grabbed him and slammed him up against the wall and did that. It was so funny, everybody started to grab me, but I started laughing because this chief of security looks at me and says “Arnold, please don't hit that man”. The reason was because if I hit him the chief of security is out of the job because he can't do nothing to me, because the people I run with, he's afraid are going to kill him.
We were some pretty militant, radical fellows at that time. In fact, you two are too young to, three actually, are too young to understand. To remember, you two may. Our organization WAPAC, when the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst, they designated Rev. Cecil Williams to be over giving out the food in all these various oppressed communities. The first day they tried to give out the food there were riots and so on and so forth. So then they designated [word] with our organization, do it. And of course we said yeah. Because we knew the food had to be given out. Randolph Hearst was a powerful man and the only other way it would be given out was the national guard and/or the police. We didn't want them doing that in our community. We didn't trust them to do that. So we said yes. What we did of course was the coalition that we built up at San Francisco State with our friends. We asked each one of them if they would give out the food in their community because they knew the people in their community. And of course it went that way and we didn't have any other people getting hurt and fighting and going to jail and all that stuff. That's what we did at that time. But the whole issue was in our community, in those days, it was just amazingly devastating what happened with the redevelopment agency.
|
